


All's Fair

by fictualities (lydiabennet)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-25
Updated: 2009-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 12:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lydiabennet/pseuds/fictualities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If Potter stopped being Potter, then what would Draco be? What part of the words 'binary opposition' did Potter not understand?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	All's Fair

**Author's Note:**

> Written pre-HBP; originally posted on LJ.

"Cultivate good enemies," Draco's father had always advised. "They make you what you are." Like many of Lucius' pronouncements, this one was cryptic. Draco liked cryptic. He loved a mystery, because mysteries are so much simpler than people make out; you can twist a mystery around your finger and make it do your bidding. Since Lucius could no longer explain himself -- he was too busy explaining himself to his phalanx of attorneys -- Draco made this particular mystery into a commentary on the Sacred Text of Potter. Potter was oh, such a good enemy, a fact that surely explained the surge of black joy Draco felt in his presence.

Potter was everything Draco was not, and for five years their conflict had made Draco . . . Draco. Potter was amiably slow, and therefore Draco was sharply clever; Potter was dull, and therefore Draco was witty; Potter was soft, and therefore Draco was diamond-hard. Potter was Dumbledore's darling, the wizarding world's precious green-eyed boy saviour, and therefore Draco was . . . Draco was . . . . but that would come with time.

Draco had been the anti-Potter since he was eleven. There was no one else for him to be. Now his father schemed in prison, his mother lounged in France, and Draco fumed in a sterile guestroom at his Irish cousins'. For a long summer he threw rocks at trees and waited.

But none of that mattered, none of it, when he got off the train at Hogwarts and felt his old sense of enmity sharpen him like a blade. Potter was the Light and the Good and the True, and so Draco's future lay before him clear and straight like an iron road. Draco would not have to think, would not have to choose, would not have to plead for admission on one side or the other. Potter was his enemy, and Potter was good, so all Draco had to do was wait for the inevitable and surrender, eventually, to the sweet, heady embrace of the dark.

Everything was perfectly simple.

Or that's the way it should have been. How like Potter to complicate matters.

It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. Not fair, that the Hero of Hogwarts skulked in corners and quarrelled with his friends. Not fair that he yawned during Dumbledore's speech, that he stared at the ceiling during NEWT-level Charms, that he turned into a madman on his broom and flew like someone trying to prove a point about mortality. Not fair that his magic, always a lurking presence terrifying to everyone but himself, should have become so . . . so quiet: powerful but withdrawn, like an animal in a cave, watching and waiting.

This was not Potter. Potter would not stop fighting him, abruptly, with no warning. He would not shrug when Draco insulted the Mudblood. He would not, for no reason, give Draco a long appraising look in the Great Hall, his fork half-way to his mouth, and stare and stare and stare. He would not crack an absent half-smile when they collided in the hallway, he would not sit in the back of Charms and snicker at one of Draco's jokes. The joke was a Slytherin joke; subtle and allusive and cruel, and Saint Potter should not have been able to understand it, let alone find it funny.

Plainly Potter had found some new, uniquely devious way to fail to cooperate. If Potter stopped being Potter, then what would Draco be? What part of the words "binary opposition" did Potter not understand?

Potter was mucking things up, crossing boundaries that shouldn't be crossed. Potter was running into him deliberately. Potter was rolling his eyes whenever the mudblood delivered an impromptu lecture. Potter was asking Draco's opinion about the Chudley Cannons' chances this year, as if he cared. Potter was smiling with intent.

Potter was annoying, Potter was a philistine, Potter was --

\-- pinning him to the wall outside History of Magic, and that was good, _so good so good so good_ , because Draco could fight back at last. He did, and for several silent, panting minutes they both accumulated bruises and small cuts. But then Potter was kissing him.

Now that was odd.

Not fiercely, the way he should have done if Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy were going to kiss; not the kind of exquisitely tortured _Enemies!!!!!!!_ kiss that's one step away from tearing someone's throat out, but slowly, carefully, cautiously, the way you'd approach a starving cat.

First Potter dealt with Draco's lower lip, just barely, a kiss mostly with the heat of his breath. Then Draco's upper lip, the same. Then a muttered: "Okay?" but Draco didn't speak, because Potter's tongue was making a long, slow, sweep against his lips, and that made speaking difficult. When Harry drew back, Draco's mind had been wiped clean, as if it were a trophy in Potter's room and Potter had come by in an idle moment to polish it.

There was one perfect moment to say something cutting, and it passed, and from that moment Draco could not extract himself from this situation and win. A Thought sounded dimly in the blankness of Draco's mind, a Thought in a voice rather like his father's, and it said: _Don't open your mouth_. Draco opened his mouth, and his world became Potter's mouth and Potter's teeth and Potter's tongue.

Then they were staring at each other, breathing hard. Binns had started droning his lecture in the classroom not twenty feet away. Anyone could have come along and seen them, and anyone might come along now.

This wasn't happening. It wasn't fair. One of Draco's hands had become entrapped somehow between Potter's robes and the hot silk smooth skin beneath. He disentangled it and adjusted Potter's glasses, which had half-fallen off his face. "Don't pity me," was the first thing that it occurred to him to say.

"I don't," said Potter, gently worrying at Draco's lower lip. He seemed obsessed with that lower lip.

"Then why?"

"I changed my mind."

"You can't change," Draco protested. "It's Not Done."

"Life," Potter declared, "sucks."

"It isn't fair," Draco said, and realized only when Potter started kissing him again that he had just surrendered. To what, he wasn't sure.

_______________________


End file.
